Open Source Training

SAP CRM Organizational Structure Basics

Classroom Notes :These notes are meant to supplement the notes that are already taken by our SAP CRM Training students during a live training session. They are however not a substitute to the actual class, since most conceptual discussions done in the class are required to understand the philosophy behind the configuration.

Overview : In SAP CRM, the entire organization ( Read Company ) is represented in the system as an Organizational Model. This is very similar to the SAP SD Enterprise structure in SAP SD Training, but much simpler and far more flexible. In fact the SAP SD Enterprise Structure is also called a rigid structure because it has to be done in a certain way and allows very little flexibility. We will discuss the differences between the SAP SD Enterprise Structure and SAP CRM Org Model in a different section. The Org Model in CRM however is both flexible as well as generic. I call it generic because, it has just two types of org elements – Organizational Unit (also called Org Unit for short) and Position. It is flexible because using this structure you can represent many entities – eg., Sales Organization, Service Organization, Marketing Organization etc.

Hands-on Organizational Model : Let’s discuss a case study of an org model from a real scenario and model it while we learn the different elements. Let’s say you are the SAP CRM consultant implementing SAP CRM for a computer manufacturer ( Magna Computers Inc., ) . The company has sales and marketing across multiple countries like the one shown in picture below. Let’s just model the marketing section of the US organizational model and you can extend the same logic for sales and service organizations as well across any country.

Organizational Units : Irrespective of what we are modeling – Marketing Top Level Org Unit or a Regional Marketing Head Office ( WEST in this case ) , or the marketing offices across cities ( LAX, SEA..etc ) , they are all represented using an “Org Unit”. Like discussed before, this results in tremendous amount of flexibility in designing complex org models with relative ease. Each of these org units can be strung up together in a hierarchy in [PPOMA_CRM] which is the transaction code used to configure the org model in SAP CRM.

[PPOCA_CRM] = Create SAP CRM Org Model

[PPOMA_CRM] = Edit/Maintain Org Model

[PPOSA_CRM] = View SAP CRM Org Model

Sometimes, when you open the transaction for the first time, you might not see the selection criteria for search. Drag the handle marked above to pull down the search criteria. You have search criteria based on Org Units, Position, User/Employee which we are going to discuss in a bit. Let’s quickly search in the IDES system for an organizational unit, say “IDES*” and you will see that there are a whole bunch of org units that has the name IDES – Pick one to see how it is organized in a hierarchical structure discussed above. I have picked IDES US and you can see that that is the top level org unit and underneath it there are more org units like “US Sales & Service” , “Purchasing West” and so on.

You can very well create your own org elements underneath IDES US by clicking on the new buttonA new Org unit will be created. Since we are focused on the Marketing Org Model, let’s try and see if we can make this a marketing org unit. Before we do anything, let’s give it a name. As you can see, the code for 2 different org units could be the same. Internally, the org unit is differentiated by the Org Unit SAP Business Partner. You can give it an address in the address tab and now for the “Function” part. There are 3 possible scenarios in which a particular org unit can be used –

Sales

Service

Marketing

You would have to clearly identify the scenario at the org unit level – In this case since we are using a marketing Org, let’s choose “Marketing”You can also choose attributes based on the scenario, once again in this case it is Marketing and the attributes associated with the Marketing scenario are available for selection.This could be a little tricky to understand – The attributes specify the relevancy for the Org Unit under a particular scenario. For example, the org unit “Marketing US” that we have created is responsible ONLY for US. Hence you specify the “country” attribute as US. You can add multiple attribute values if desired by clicking on the “+” button to the left of the attribute description. If an attribute is mandatory to be filled in (Required Attribute set in OOATTRCUST ) with a value, then the attribute will be marked accordingly. In some cases, custom attributes need to be maintained via “How to Create Custom Attributes for Org Units in CRM“In case there are any issues with maintaining the attributes for a particular scenario for a unit, you can do a consistency check and any errors/warnings will be identified for you. This could be a big life saver in debugging SAP CRM organizational data determination.

Attribute Inheritance : Once we start building the org structure that we intended to build, we will realize soon that the child Org Element will inherit attributes from the parent. The attributes in the child org unit are unchangeable. In the structure above, the org unit “Marketing US” has the country attribute as mandatory and we have specified US in it. The subsequent lower level org units Laptop Marketing, Post PC Marketing and second level marketing offices inherit the same attribute. However, you can modify attributes that were not inherited – in this case the product category has been changed at the POST PC Marketing org unit level to “PCSHOP..” which could represent a Post PC product category signifying that this marketing org unit only deals with that particular product line.

Special Org Units : In the first picture, there are 4 different org elements – Marketing Org unit , WEST Org Unit and LAX Org Unit. At the highest level, typically an org unit is classified as a “Marketing Organization” , “Sales Organization” , “Sales Office” etc and they represent the type of org unit which is hard coded into SAP – As opposed to Country, Product Category etc which can be customized.

Position : The second key element in SAP CRM Org Model is Position . CEO, Regional Sales Manager, Marketing Executive etc are all examples of position. Each position is filled by either a user or an employee. As usual, you can freely define positions. In Order to do that, select the Org Element and right click to create. For example, we want to create a position ‘Marketing Manager’ for the San Francisco Marketing Office, here is how we do it.

Step 1 : Right Click the Org Unit and click on “Create”

Step 2 : In the pop-up for Choose Relationship, select “Incorporates Position” and click continueStep 3 : Give name to the newly created position in the Basic Data and hit Enter. Step 4 : Go to Attributes and make sure that the consistency check is done and the inherited attributes are visible from the parent Org unit. Step 5 : Let’s now assign a user/employee to the position. For example, let’s assign ourselves to the Marketing Manager position. Right click on the position and click on assign.You will get the “Choose Relationship” pop-up – Select ‘Holder – User’ in this case since we want to assign our own user id to the position. In the ensuing pop-up select the user and save it. Voila !! Your assignment is complete.

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